Beata Woźniak-Jęchorek

Department of Macroeconomics and Development Studies,

Poznań University of Economics and Business,

Poland

Beata.wozniak-jechorek@ue.poznan.pl 

ORCID 0000-0002-5029-5885

Retreat or reallocation? Economic structure and the persistence of remote work in EU regions, 2018–2024

Sławomir Kuźmar

Department of Macroeconomics and Development Studies,

Poznań University of Economics and Business,

Poland

Slawomir.kuzmar@ue.poznan.pl 

ORCID 0000-0002-2458-0463

Abstract. This paper asks how the pandemic expansion of remote work was distributed across EU regions, whether that distribution has proved durable, and whether the decline observed after 2021 is a genuine retreat or a change in form. Using EU-LFS microdata for 204 regions in the 27 member states over 2018-2024, we distinguish three margins of home-working: the Eurostat categories usually and sometimes, and their sum. We treat the pandemic as the event in an event study with region and year fixed effects and ask whether regions responded to it differently depending on their pre-pandemic employment structure. Regions with a higher pre-pandemic share of knowledge-intensive services responded far more strongly: those in the top quarter of pre-pandemic knowledge-intensive employment gained around 3 percentage points more participation than the rest, and the gap was as wide in 2024 as in 2021. Comparing regions only with others in the same country narrows the gap by about a quarter, but most of it remains. What has changed is the form, not the extent. The apparent return to the office is largely a move from full-time to hybrid work, visible only when remote work is measured by intensity. Economic structure, not income, education or digital infrastructure, is what separates regions. Remote work has so far accrued to the regions that already had the employment structure to absorb it.

Received: July, 2025

1st Revision: May, 2026

Accepted: August, 2026

DOI: 10.14254/2071-8330.2026/19-3/6

JEL Classification: J21, J24, R12, O33

Keywords: remote working, work-from-home, hybrid work, regional inequalities, knowledge-intensive services